8 ms·

Kendo UI - a framework for modern HTML UI

201 points by fbnt 15y ago

lean 15y ago
Seems like an obvious FAQ would be, "How does this compare to jQuery UI?".
- nathanwdavis 15y ago
  or "how does it compare to jQuery Mobile?"
- TrevorBurnham 15y ago
  It appears to be more oriented toward enterprises, who'd be happy to license this just for internal web apps. You've got Grid and Chart widgets (must-haves for internal sites that show business data), but no Datepicker (a must-have for consumer-facing sites).
  - bundyo 15y ago
    A Datepicker is currently being worked on.
    - TrevorBurnham 15y ago
      Good to know. I've gotta say, the jQuery UI Datepicker is just perfect. If I use jQuery UI on a site, it's almost certainly just for the Datepicker.
  - lukeschlather 15y ago
    I'm not sure I buy that. I've been looking at moving some of our antiquated Access reports to an intranet web form, and the first thing I needed was a datepicker.
dillon 15y ago
I couldn't say if jQuery UI is better or this is better, honestly seems they are just different. Even if Kendo UI is faster I have never had a speed issue with jQuery UI (not speaking for everyone, just, I personally have never had a speed issue).
- chime 15y ago
  The UI Widgets seem quite nice and well-designed: http://demos.kendoui.com/combobox/remotedatasource.html http://demos.kendoui.com/combobox/remotedatasource.html This is closer to ExtJS and Sencha than JQ UI.
- Turing_Machine 15y ago
  jQuery UI is pretty sluggish under some of the iOS build-app-in-JS frameworks (e.g., PhoneGap) and for webapps because those don't use the new nitro engine (I understand that's coming in iOS 5). It's not nearly as bad under standalone Safari with a mobile web page. If someone wanted to test their performance claims, that might be a good thing to try.
stoph 15y ago
I'm having a hard time nailing down what the killer features are here. For example, I saw that they advertise drag-and-drop with support for touch devices, but I couldn't even find the drag and drop demo on the site.
- jwarzech 15y ago
  Here is a link to their drag and drop demo http://demos.kendoui.com/datasource/index.html http://demos.kendoui.com/datasource/index.html
  - stoph 15y ago
    Thanks. I'll be checking this out, although I was hoping they would also have something equivalent to jQuery's Sortable (http://jqueryui.com/demos/sortable/ http://jqueryui.com/demos/sortable/).
twog 15y ago
We arent far away from being able to copy and paste beautiful front-end designs.
- georgemcbay 15y ago
  Technology to simply create beautiful designs using copy&paste/drag&drop is about 2 years off... just as it has been for the past 20 years.
trb 15y ago
Using Chrome13 on Ubuntu, when I try to use the Drag&Drop Demo, the draggable element jumps to the lower right corner of the mouse cursor. In the slider demo, rapidly clicking multiple times on the left or right arrow to increase/decrease the value fires a doubleclick event, highlighting most of the text on the site. In the window demo, the mouse cursor does not change when I hover over the title bar, although the window is draggable. It's these little details that scare me off. When I use a framework, I want it to take care of everything. If I have to add css classes for the mouse cursor or fix element positioning, I'd just build what I need myself.
- eren-tantekin 15y ago
  i have the same issue on drag dropping with chrome on linux
- danellis 15y ago
  Even worse, on Chrome on Mac the entire page flashes black for a fraction of a second every time you select something from a drop-down list. Unusable.
notb 15y ago
For some reason, in Chrome 13 on OS X, some of the UI animations cause the browser view to go black for a second and redraw. Not sure if this is just a Chrome bug but it's really obnoxious and means I won't use it until it's smoother.
- bundyo 15y ago
  Since we are doing the animations with CSS transitions when available, we are affected by several bugs in Chrome's 3D CSS transitions (mainly when switching into and out of composited mode): http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=87437 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=87437 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=77126 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=77126 It can be seen as flicker in Windows and there are some reports of black flashes in OS X. Switching the 3D acceleration off seems to fix them, but unfortunately it can be done only with a command line switch. We may forfeit the CSS transition animations in Chrome in later releases if we can't find a fix for these issues.
sgt 15y ago
It looks pretty good. Good UX and well designed, and I see that it's based on jQuery. That's useful for many reasons, e.g. you can least pull jQuery from a CDN.
- gyoshev 15y ago
  by the way, all kendo scripts are also hosted on CDN
WayneDB 15y ago
I apologize in advance if this opinion offends anyone, but every HTML UI kit that I've seen simply can't hold a candle to native kits such as WinForms, WPF or even Cocoa. I would really love a write-once browser based solution, but I just can't see that type of solution ever catching up to native tech. How long do we have to wait before the browser can catch up? Do you think it will ever happen? The closest thing that I've ever seen is Silverlight. With it I've been able to make some very excellent front-ends, with EASE, that look and behave identically between Mac and Windows. EDIT: The only challenge with Silverlight has been wheel-scrolling, which works fine on Windows but only works in Out-Of-Browser on the Mac.
- wslh 15y ago
  I completely agree and I am very sad that a lot of people can't be rational about this. The vision of HTML5 may be towards that direction, but when I do a simple test with SVG and found ugly issues on Google Chrome (I move a specific object but it left a trail behind) then I understand that we are far from there, may be 2 years in development and business terms? Also the development side, something like the criticized old Visual Basic, an IDE where you can quickly design a rich UI with a lot of controls. It will be an irony if the best IDE for HTML5 came from Microsoft on Visual Studio >= 2012? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zNKE5vprMqUJ:ogrelabs.com/2011/06/14/visual-studio-meet-html5/+Visual+studio+2012+%2Bjavascript+%2Bhtml5&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ar http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zNKE5vp... Macromedia, Google et al have opportunities but they move slowly in this direction. It's also strange to be developing and debugging CPython using Visual Studio http://pytools.codeplex.com/ http://pytools.codeplex.com/
- firemanx 15y ago
  I'm in the same boat. The problem I keep finding with a lot of these UI libs is that they don't have layout managers. We settled on dojo because we wanted an open source option with a layout manager, but it's got other headaches we need to deal with.
- jakejake 15y ago
  I think Sencha is possibly the closest to that for the web right now. I find it fairly similar to writing form-based desktop applications.
sunchild 15y ago
I've learned from experience to run away from these kinds of UI kits. I always end up hacking around their shortcomings (e.g., tokenized inputs with autocomplete, etc.) This one does seem to have a nice, compact, intelligible stylesheet, though – big improvement over jQuery UI there.
dgreensp 15y ago
Hate to jump on the negative bandwagon, but... I had a momentary hope for something truly novel, but found the usual aggregation of data-binding framework, templating language, and widget kit, where the widgets have various bugs/quirks that make them undesirable to use as is.
ereckers 15y ago
This is a bit off the topic of your actual framework, but as far as branding, I love your logo. Do you mind sharing the person/company that designed it for you?
alphadogg 15y ago
Needs a lot more baking. For web apps built now, I use ExtJS. The newest release has been a little too buggy, but they are working hard to make it better.
snorkel 15y ago
Nice but decent upload widgets these days include support for drop-zone uploading.
- bundyo 15y ago
  There is a drop zone if supported by the browser. Try dropping a file here: http://demos.kendoui.com/upload/async.html http://demos.kendoui.com/upload/async.html in Chrome or Firefox.
goodside 15y ago
Note: You cannnot use this library on your web site. The licensing agreement forbids you from redistributing the library, whether or not it's minified. It further states, "You are not allowed to integrate the Software into end products or use it for any commercial or productive purpose." So private deployment is out too. It's strictly for your own evaluation and amusement. http://www.kendoui.com/download/licenseagreement.aspx?skuId=436 http://www.kendoui.com/download/licenseagreement.aspx?skuId=... Have fun with that. [Edit: Their web site has conflicting information in the FAQ. See below.] [Edit: Updated link. Thanks pakitan.]
- TrevorBurnham 15y ago
  That link just takes me to an error page. The FAQ says "Kendo UI is dual-licensed, Commercial and Open Source (GPLv2)"—and furthermore, that "During the Beta phase, no commercial license is available." [Edit: Updated link did work. Yeah, that license agreement is... not GPL-compatible. I'm guessing they duplicated the same boilerplate that they use for trial versions of their .NET libraries.]
- redidas 15y ago
  After poking around on their website, I noticed that this library is being developed by Telerik (http://www.telerik.com/ http://www.telerik.com/), which is a pretty big vendor for .net libraries. The trouble is I don't think they have a library for MVC3-ish apps with a front-end focus. At my place of work, we are ditching the traditional asp.net development and porting our app to MVC3. In the switch our Telerik .net controls were no longer usable, and we switched to jQuery UI. I'm sure this will just end up being their solution to jQuery UI, to the corporate types that already use their current offerings.
  - TomOfTTB 15y ago
    It's funny because Telerik's evangelist has been pushing HTML5 hard lately (http://www.telerikwatch.com/ http://www.telerikwatch.com/) and I found it curious because Telerik's current offerings are useless to anyone who wants to write an HTML5 solution on MVC (they do have a half hearted MVC project but it pales in comparison to the free solutions available for Javascript/JQuery development)
TrevorBurnham 15y ago
I'd seriously consider using this, just because of the stagnancy of jQuery UI. It's a massive project with hundreds of long-open tickets (despite thousands of dollars spent on incentivizing developers over the summer through http://rewardjs.com/ http://rewardjs.com/). 1.8 was released in March of 2010, and the last milestone release for 1.9 was back in May. To be fair, a lot of jQuery UI's development headaches come from supporting IE6, while Kendo only touts its support for IE7+...
- cshenoy 15y ago
  There seems to be some inconsistencies across the site including support for IE6. The demo page (http://demos.kendoui.com/ http://demos.kendoui.com/) says it does while the overview page (http://www.kendoui.com/kendo-ui.aspx http://www.kendoui.com/kendo-ui.aspx) says IE7+. Weird.
- kaffesump 15y ago
  I would like to make a guess and say that the stagnancy of jQuery UI has a lot to do with jQuery Mobile (which if I'm not incorrect actually is a child-project of jQuery UI). I do however agree, jQuery UI is in many ways awesome, but needs to pick up speed.
zedshaw 15y ago
If you take away how this looks, and start digging into the project from a beginner's perspective, this project is awful. I find this with most of the supposed "UI frameworks" out there for HTML. With a few exceptions, they mostly lack: 1. Good documentation that doesn't just define the framework, but teaches you how to use it and get stuff done with it. Code already defines what it is, your docs should tell me why it's this way and how to use it. In Kendo UI they've got a list of dependencies for javascript projects they need, then a few code snippets with no explanation as to why or how they work. 2. Good sample code, in a full complete project you can download, with documentation on getting it up and running. Your first sample code is how everyone will write code using your project. If you've got bad samples, poor formatting, and weird file layouts (or none), then that's what everyone will write and that's what you'll be known for. 3. Examples that gradually increase in complexity. Start off with a simple hello world, graduate to a chat app or something simple, and get them to a full blown large application. In this Kendo example they've got a demo picture viewer, with no explanation for how it was built, and viewing the source it looks like a huge mess. 4. Humor. These kinds of documentation are boring as hell, especially if you're just defining everything. It doesn't have to be insanely hilarious, but at least throw a few little funny tidbits in the code. Even the great tech books of our time have tiny little jokes for the people who pay attention. 5. Finally, these frameworks rarely have a "theme". MVC is a theme. Convention over configuration is a theme. There's only one way to do it. There's more than one way to do it. Themes work to help people keep the script for why everything works the way it does in their head. It's too bad because this looks really good, and it could be the most awesome thing on the planet. But if I can't figure it out even if I want to, then I'm never going to try. Finally, none of what I wrote above applies if your project is for fun and not meant to be a "product".
- NHQ 15y ago
  Hm. If you look --> in the documentation <-- you find your first protest invalid. And in those docs you will find plenty of sample code, for your second protest, and examples (#3) to go with them (what is sample code if not an example?). #4 Protest too much? #5 Does a framework's theme need a template, too, or will a motif do?
youngtaff 15y ago
Let's hope the code produced by the controls is better than the code Telerik's CMS generates...
youngtaff 15y ago
Let's hope the code produced by the controls is better than the code Telerik's CMS generates...
forgotusername 15y ago
Demo pages are completely broken for keyboard navigation (try tabbing or activating the accordion widget). Wake me up when the hard stuff is actually working (accessibility!)
pbreit 15y ago
The problem I have with this and JQueryUI is that both are still too stylized such that they don't lend themselves well to being integrated into an existing design. And the JqueryUI themeroller doesn't help much. YUI probably does the best job of being generic enough to utilize broadly.
ayanb 15y ago
Has anybody downloaded this yet? I see three css files and one minified js. What is the total size of all three of these?
- burkeholland 15y ago
  The .js file is coming in at 233.85 kb when pulled from the CDN, but that's the whole framework. I think it's highly likely that they will create a modular packaging system so you can get just what you need. The styles are under 70 kb combined.
kls 15y ago
The question I am asking myself right now is how did this project make it to the top slot of HN. It seems to be a re-hash of some standard frameworks, some bad documentation, some buggy widgets and be backed by a largish vendor. I hate to say it, but it reeks of a voting ring.
- fbnt 15y ago
  Hey, don't shoot the messenger! I am no related whatsoever with Kendo UI, I read about it on twitter and thought to submit it here to see what you guys think of it. I'm pretty sure there's no voting rings involved. -the OP.
  - kls 15y ago
    It just seemed kind of strange to me to have a pretty uneventful project hit the top slot. I appreciate your reply and it probably just generated a lot of conversation it just seemed unusual for HN.
wavephorm 15y ago
It actually looks pretty good and would save you a ton of time rather than trying to build some of these widgets yourself. But are people willing to buy a framework like this? Or is everyone just using JQuery UI and leaving it at that?
duggi 15y ago
PAGE BLINKS WHEN YOU USE THE UI WIDGETS
scotty79 15y ago
Aeroviewr button borders look ugly in Chrome and on Samsung Galaxy S also arrow on play button is of center. Dragging on SGS shows circular dragged object as if dragged by left top corner of bounding box.
secoif 15y ago
I'm always put off when a framework doesn't get straight down to the code/usage examples. Down with meta bloat.

201 points by fbnt 15y ago

lean 15y ago

Seems like an obvious FAQ would be, "How does this compare to jQuery UI?".

nathanwdavis 15y ago
or "how does it compare to jQuery Mobile?"
TrevorBurnham 15y ago
It appears to be more oriented toward enterprises, who'd be happy to license this just for internal web apps. You've got Grid and Chart widgets (must-haves for internal sites that show business data), but no Datepicker (a must-have for consumer-facing sites).
- bundyo 15y ago
  A Datepicker is currently being worked on.
  - TrevorBurnham 15y ago
    Good to know. I've gotta say, the jQuery UI Datepicker is just perfect. If I use jQuery UI on a site, it's almost certainly just for the Datepicker.
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  I'm not sure I buy that. I've been looking at moving some of our antiquated Access reports to an intranet web form, and the first thing I needed was a datepicker.

dillon 15y ago

I couldn't say if jQuery UI is better or this is better, honestly seems they are just different. Even if Kendo UI is faster I have never had a speed issue with jQuery UI (not speaking for everyone, just, I personally have never had a speed issue).

chime 15y ago
The UI Widgets seem quite nice and well-designed: http://demos.kendoui.com/combobox/remotedatasource.html http://demos.kendoui.com/combobox/remotedatasource.html This is closer to ExtJS and Sencha than JQ UI.
Turing_Machine 15y ago
jQuery UI is pretty sluggish under some of the iOS build-app-in-JS frameworks (e.g., PhoneGap) and for webapps because those don't use the new nitro engine (I understand that's coming in iOS 5). It's not nearly as bad under standalone Safari with a mobile web page. If someone wanted to test their performance claims, that might be a good thing to try.

stoph 15y ago

I'm having a hard time nailing down what the killer features are here. For example, I saw that they advertise drag-and-drop with support for touch devices, but I couldn't even find the drag and drop demo on the site.

jwarzech 15y ago
Here is a link to their drag and drop demo http://demos.kendoui.com/datasource/index.html http://demos.kendoui.com/datasource/index.html
- stoph 15y ago
  Thanks. I'll be checking this out, although I was hoping they would also have something equivalent to jQuery's Sortable (http://jqueryui.com/demos/sortable/ http://jqueryui.com/demos/sortable/).

twog 15y ago

We arent far away from being able to copy and paste beautiful front-end designs.

georgemcbay 15y ago
Technology to simply create beautiful designs using copy&paste/drag&drop is about 2 years off... just as it has been for the past 20 years.

trb 15y ago

Using Chrome13 on Ubuntu, when I try to use the Drag&Drop Demo, the draggable element jumps to the lower right corner of the mouse cursor. In the slider demo, rapidly clicking multiple times on the left or right arrow to increase/decrease the value fires a doubleclick event, highlighting most of the text on the site. In the window demo, the mouse cursor does not change when I hover over the title bar, although the window is draggable. It's these little details that scare me off. When I use a framework, I want it to take care of everything. If I have to add css classes for the mouse cursor or fix element positioning, I'd just build what I need myself.

eren-tantekin 15y ago
i have the same issue on drag dropping with chrome on linux
danellis 15y ago
Even worse, on Chrome on Mac the entire page flashes black for a fraction of a second every time you select something from a drop-down list. Unusable.

notb 15y ago

For some reason, in Chrome 13 on OS X, some of the UI animations cause the browser view to go black for a second and redraw. Not sure if this is just a Chrome bug but it's really obnoxious and means I won't use it until it's smoother.

bundyo 15y ago
Since we are doing the animations with CSS transitions when available, we are affected by several bugs in Chrome's 3D CSS transitions (mainly when switching into and out of composited mode): http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=87437 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=87437 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=77126 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=77126 It can be seen as flicker in Windows and there are some reports of black flashes in OS X. Switching the 3D acceleration off seems to fix them, but unfortunately it can be done only with a command line switch. We may forfeit the CSS transition animations in Chrome in later releases if we can't find a fix for these issues.

sgt 15y ago

It looks pretty good. Good UX and well designed, and I see that it's based on jQuery. That's useful for many reasons, e.g. you can least pull jQuery from a CDN.

gyoshev 15y ago
by the way, all kendo scripts are also hosted on CDN

WayneDB 15y ago

I apologize in advance if this opinion offends anyone, but every HTML UI kit that I've seen simply can't hold a candle to native kits such as WinForms, WPF or even Cocoa. I would really love a write-once browser based solution, but I just can't see that type of solution ever catching up to native tech. How long do we have to wait before the browser can catch up? Do you think it will ever happen? The closest thing that I've ever seen is Silverlight. With it I've been able to make some very excellent front-ends, with EASE, that look and behave identically between Mac and Windows. EDIT: The only challenge with Silverlight has been wheel-scrolling, which works fine on Windows but only works in Out-Of-Browser on the Mac.

wslh 15y ago
I completely agree and I am very sad that a lot of people can't be rational about this. The vision of HTML5 may be towards that direction, but when I do a simple test with SVG and found ugly issues on Google Chrome (I move a specific object but it left a trail behind) then I understand that we are far from there, may be 2 years in development and business terms? Also the development side, something like the criticized old Visual Basic, an IDE where you can quickly design a rich UI with a lot of controls. It will be an irony if the best IDE for HTML5 came from Microsoft on Visual Studio >= 2012? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zNKE5vprMqUJ:ogrelabs.com/2011/06/14/visual-studio-meet-html5/+Visual+studio+2012+%2Bjavascript+%2Bhtml5&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ar http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zNKE5vp... Macromedia, Google et al have opportunities but they move slowly in this direction. It's also strange to be developing and debugging CPython using Visual Studio http://pytools.codeplex.com/ http://pytools.codeplex.com/
firemanx 15y ago
I'm in the same boat. The problem I keep finding with a lot of these UI libs is that they don't have layout managers. We settled on dojo because we wanted an open source option with a layout manager, but it's got other headaches we need to deal with.
jakejake 15y ago
I think Sencha is possibly the closest to that for the web right now. I find it fairly similar to writing form-based desktop applications.

sunchild 15y ago

I've learned from experience to run away from these kinds of UI kits. I always end up hacking around their shortcomings (e.g., tokenized inputs with autocomplete, etc.) This one does seem to have a nice, compact, intelligible stylesheet, though – big improvement over jQuery UI there.

dgreensp 15y ago

Hate to jump on the negative bandwagon, but... I had a momentary hope for something truly novel, but found the usual aggregation of data-binding framework, templating language, and widget kit, where the widgets have various bugs/quirks that make them undesirable to use as is.

ereckers 15y ago

This is a bit off the topic of your actual framework, but as far as branding, I love your logo. Do you mind sharing the person/company that designed it for you?

alphadogg 15y ago

Needs a lot more baking. For web apps built now, I use ExtJS. The newest release has been a little too buggy, but they are working hard to make it better.

snorkel 15y ago

Nice but decent upload widgets these days include support for drop-zone uploading.

bundyo 15y ago
There is a drop zone if supported by the browser. Try dropping a file here: http://demos.kendoui.com/upload/async.html http://demos.kendoui.com/upload/async.html in Chrome or Firefox.

goodside 15y ago

Note: You cannnot use this library on your web site. The licensing agreement forbids you from redistributing the library, whether or not it's minified. It further states, "You are not allowed to integrate the Software into end products or use it for any commercial or productive purpose." So private deployment is out too. It's strictly for your own evaluation and amusement. http://www.kendoui.com/download/licenseagreement.aspx?skuId=436 http://www.kendoui.com/download/licenseagreement.aspx?skuId=... Have fun with that. [Edit: Their web site has conflicting information in the FAQ. See below.] [Edit: Updated link. Thanks pakitan.]

TrevorBurnham 15y ago
That link just takes me to an error page. The FAQ says "Kendo UI is dual-licensed, Commercial and Open Source (GPLv2)"—and furthermore, that "During the Beta phase, no commercial license is available." [Edit: Updated link did work. Yeah, that license agreement is... not GPL-compatible. I'm guessing they duplicated the same boilerplate that they use for trial versions of their .NET libraries.]
redidas 15y ago
After poking around on their website, I noticed that this library is being developed by Telerik (http://www.telerik.com/ http://www.telerik.com/), which is a pretty big vendor for .net libraries. The trouble is I don't think they have a library for MVC3-ish apps with a front-end focus. At my place of work, we are ditching the traditional asp.net development and porting our app to MVC3. In the switch our Telerik .net controls were no longer usable, and we switched to jQuery UI. I'm sure this will just end up being their solution to jQuery UI, to the corporate types that already use their current offerings.
- TomOfTTB 15y ago
  It's funny because Telerik's evangelist has been pushing HTML5 hard lately (http://www.telerikwatch.com/ http://www.telerikwatch.com/) and I found it curious because Telerik's current offerings are useless to anyone who wants to write an HTML5 solution on MVC (they do have a half hearted MVC project but it pales in comparison to the free solutions available for Javascript/JQuery development)

TrevorBurnham 15y ago

I'd seriously consider using this, just because of the stagnancy of jQuery UI. It's a massive project with hundreds of long-open tickets (despite thousands of dollars spent on incentivizing developers over the summer through http://rewardjs.com/ http://rewardjs.com/). 1.8 was released in March of 2010, and the last milestone release for 1.9 was back in May. To be fair, a lot of jQuery UI's development headaches come from supporting IE6, while Kendo only touts its support for IE7+...

cshenoy 15y ago
There seems to be some inconsistencies across the site including support for IE6. The demo page (http://demos.kendoui.com/ http://demos.kendoui.com/) says it does while the overview page (http://www.kendoui.com/kendo-ui.aspx http://www.kendoui.com/kendo-ui.aspx) says IE7+. Weird.
kaffesump 15y ago
I would like to make a guess and say that the stagnancy of jQuery UI has a lot to do with jQuery Mobile (which if I'm not incorrect actually is a child-project of jQuery UI). I do however agree, jQuery UI is in many ways awesome, but needs to pick up speed.

zedshaw 15y ago

If you take away how this looks, and start digging into the project from a beginner's perspective, this project is awful. I find this with most of the supposed "UI frameworks" out there for HTML. With a few exceptions, they mostly lack: 1. Good documentation that doesn't just define the framework, but teaches you how to use it and get stuff done with it. Code already defines what it is, your docs should tell me why it's this way and how to use it. In Kendo UI they've got a list of dependencies for javascript projects they need, then a few code snippets with no explanation as to why or how they work. 2. Good sample code, in a full complete project you can download, with documentation on getting it up and running. Your first sample code is how everyone will write code using your project. If you've got bad samples, poor formatting, and weird file layouts (or none), then that's what everyone will write and that's what you'll be known for. 3. Examples that gradually increase in complexity. Start off with a simple hello world, graduate to a chat app or something simple, and get them to a full blown large application. In this Kendo example they've got a demo picture viewer, with no explanation for how it was built, and viewing the source it looks like a huge mess. 4. Humor. These kinds of documentation are boring as hell, especially if you're just defining everything. It doesn't have to be insanely hilarious, but at least throw a few little funny tidbits in the code. Even the great tech books of our time have tiny little jokes for the people who pay attention. 5. Finally, these frameworks rarely have a "theme". MVC is a theme. Convention over configuration is a theme. There's only one way to do it. There's more than one way to do it. Themes work to help people keep the script for why everything works the way it does in their head. It's too bad because this looks really good, and it could be the most awesome thing on the planet. But if I can't figure it out even if I want to, then I'm never going to try. Finally, none of what I wrote above applies if your project is for fun and not meant to be a "product".

NHQ 15y ago
Hm. If you look --> in the documentation <-- you find your first protest invalid. And in those docs you will find plenty of sample code, for your second protest, and examples (#3) to go with them (what is sample code if not an example?). #4 Protest too much? #5 Does a framework's theme need a template, too, or will a motif do?

youngtaff 15y ago

Let's hope the code produced by the controls is better than the code Telerik's CMS generates...

youngtaff 15y ago

Let's hope the code produced by the controls is better than the code Telerik's CMS generates...

forgotusername 15y ago

Demo pages are completely broken for keyboard navigation (try tabbing or activating the accordion widget). Wake me up when the hard stuff is actually working (accessibility!)

pbreit 15y ago

The problem I have with this and JQueryUI is that both are still too stylized such that they don't lend themselves well to being integrated into an existing design. And the JqueryUI themeroller doesn't help much. YUI probably does the best job of being generic enough to utilize broadly.

ayanb 15y ago

Has anybody downloaded this yet? I see three css files and one minified js. What is the total size of all three of these?

burkeholland 15y ago
The .js file is coming in at 233.85 kb when pulled from the CDN, but that's the whole framework. I think it's highly likely that they will create a modular packaging system so you can get just what you need. The styles are under 70 kb combined.

kls 15y ago

The question I am asking myself right now is how did this project make it to the top slot of HN. It seems to be a re-hash of some standard frameworks, some bad documentation, some buggy widgets and be backed by a largish vendor. I hate to say it, but it reeks of a voting ring.

fbnt 15y ago
Hey, don't shoot the messenger! I am no related whatsoever with Kendo UI, I read about it on twitter and thought to submit it here to see what you guys think of it. I'm pretty sure there's no voting rings involved. -the OP.
- kls 15y ago
  It just seemed kind of strange to me to have a pretty uneventful project hit the top slot. I appreciate your reply and it probably just generated a lot of conversation it just seemed unusual for HN.

wavephorm 15y ago

It actually looks pretty good and would save you a ton of time rather than trying to build some of these widgets yourself. But are people willing to buy a framework like this? Or is everyone just using JQuery UI and leaving it at that?

duggi 15y ago

PAGE BLINKS WHEN YOU USE THE UI WIDGETS

scotty79 15y ago

Aeroviewr button borders look ugly in Chrome and on Samsung Galaxy S also arrow on play button is of center. Dragging on SGS shows circular dragged object as if dragged by left top corner of bounding box.

secoif 15y ago

I'm always put off when a framework doesn't get straight down to the code/usage examples. Down with meta bloat.